Ideas for building your own book scanner
We live in exciting times. Technology that would have cost thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars a few years ago can now be made at home using a little money and a lot of ingenuity. Book scanners are a great example of this – with some research, some money, and some time it’s … Read more
Love, sex, and ngrams – a brief Valentine’s Day post
Feeling in the Valentine’s Day spirit yesterday, I decided to play around with Google’s ngram viewer and trends. Google ngram viewer draws data from the corpus of Google Books and displays how frequently certain words or phrases are used. Google trends works in a similar fashion, displaying how often certain words and phrases are searched for … Read more
DigiWriMo Day 5: ‘Groundswell’ Review
A few months ago, after reading a post on the blog History Punk about how academics can develop a personal digital marketing strategy, I asked the blog’s author Jo Hawkins to recommend a book from the marketing world that would also be useful for academics. She recommended a book called Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by … Read more
How to fail on the internet – or, why the Argyll and Bute Council misunderstood the groundswell
By now many of you have probably read about nine year-old food blogger Martha Payne from Argyll, Scotland. She and her blog NeverSeconds have captured the internet’s heart after the Argyll and Bute Council prohibited her from taking pictures of her school lunches with her camera phone, under the guise of prohibiting students from taking inappropriate pictures at school. … Read more
“There’s only one rule I know of: goddamn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
Today I read How to Steal Like an Artist: 10 things nobody told you about being creative (available as a book, but I read the free pdf version). In it the author, Austin Kleon, gives his philosophy of how to be creative in the 21st century. Kleon stresses the importance of being kind, especially the importance of … Read more
